DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story (2004)

Awesome Movie

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

So this is a very basic story. Struggling gym is about to go bankrupt, enters a dodgeball tournament to earn a cash price, and has to oppose Ben Stiller and his ego.See, who needs wordy essays? Not that this is a bad film, but really, most of the humour derives from people being injured by projectiles being launched at them at high velocities. That and Ben Stiller's character who is essentially Ben Stiller if he snorted a little too much cocaine.The characters have humorous backstories, apart from the token black guy who is just left to wisecrack half the time. Vince Vaughn plays the fairly laid back manager of his failing gym, taunted by Ben Stiller's character, a fitness obsessed lunatic who attempts to seize the property.Fairly gratuitous gags, but mildly entertaining. The gimmick gets old after a while though.

Basically, my thoughts about this movie can be summed up in the title of this review. A family member of mine got this movie as a gift last Christmas, and just recently I was in a "comedy" mood and gave it a viewing. By the end of the film, though, the only person I was laughing at was myself for sitting through the whole thing.The problems with this film are numerous: The jokes rely way too much on crude humor, they often aren't even funny in that area, and the goal of the film (to combine comedy with an even somewhat compelling storyline) is not even close to realized. About the only positive impact this movie had on society was to get people playing the game of dodgeball once again. Yet, it was no thanks to the jokes in this movie...just the base subject matter.Thus, if you are looking for 90 minutes of laughter, please look elsewhere. Only a couple of decently funny scenarios kept this movie away from a bottom-of-the-barrel one star rating, and a "1.5 stars" would have been the optimal rating. Fans of Ben Stiller will find Zoolander to offer more genuine laughs, while others may want to steer clear of this entire comedy genre altogether.

This was a pretty good comedy and typical of the humor used by stars Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn. The movie starts off with Vaughn and Stiller as fitness gym owners in close proximity to each other. Vaughn's gym is pretty run-down and in deep financial debt and about to be taken over by Stiller's more "high-class" gym. He has to come up with $50,000 to pay him off. Fortunately, Vaughn has a devoted group of regulars, and one of them finds a dodgeball tournament in Vegas, and one guess how much the big prize is worth? Of course they enter it! So does Stiller and his gym of devotees.My favorite scenes were the ones with the girl scouts, the uniform mixup, and the final showdown and the final scenes. This was pretty funny fare mostly all the way through. You might like it if you are a comedy fan and like the stars. The tournament scenes were terrific!** 1/2 out of ****

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story is a fast-paced and very funny sports comedy that scores points for being centered around a sport that hasn't been the subject of too many movies.The movie stars Vince Vaughn playing one of his most likable characters, Peter LaFleur, the owner of a gym that is about to go under who puts together a rag-tag team of misfits to participate in a dodgeball tournament in Las Vegas in order to win the large cash prize.Prior to this movie, I had no idea that dodgeball was a team sport that has Olympic-like rules, displayed here In a hilarious training film that Peter shows his team. This premise sets up a classic Revenge of the Nerds-esque confrontation between Peter's team and a team from a rival gym that wants to buy Peter out, owned by the arrogant White Goodman (Ben Stiller).A romantic triangle is also set up with the presence of an accountant who has been hired to help Peter, but White ends up trying to pursue her as well. Ironically, this role is played by Ben Stiller's real-life spouse, Christine Taylor, who first caught our eye as Marcia in the two Brady Bunch movies.Vaughn is actually the straight man here to Stiller, who is hysterically funny here, as are Stephen Root, Chris Williams, and Alan Tudyk as members of Peter's team, Missi Pyle as a beast from White's team, Gary Cole and Jason Bateman as color commentators at the tournament, and especially Rip Torn as Patches Houlihan, the alleged Dodgeball legend who agrees to help coach Peter's team.Funny dialogue, music video-paced direction and cast that aims to please help to make this comedy worth checking out.